Grid Autosport wants you to earn your seat. Codemasters built the 2014 racer around a career mode where you sign with teams, chase sponsor objectives and climb through five racing disciplines. It is a deliberate step back from Grid 2, and the studio has said as much: the previous entry did not land with its core fanbase the way it hoped. So the handling model got rebuilt, the design got leaner, and the pitch became race-first.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
A Driver for Hire, Not a Star
You do not play a hero in Grid Autosport. You play a driver for hire, taking offers from racing teams season by season. Most of those teams return from Race Driver: Grid, including Ravenwest, the best in the business. Each outfit carries its own season objectives and sponsor objectives, and hitting them pays extra experience points on top of what your finishing position earns.
That structure does real work. It turns the career into a run of negotiations rather than a run of races, and it gives the five disciplines a reason to exist beyond menu sorting.
You specialise, or you conquer all of them.
Touring, Endurance, Open Wheel, Tuner, Street
The disciplines are the spine of the game. Touring, Endurance, Open Wheel, Tuner and Street each field markedly different cars and race types, and each event is a string of races that makes up a season. Pick an event in one category, run the season, move on. Over 100 routes spread across 22 locations back that up, and the in-car view returns after sitting out Grid 2.
For a certain kind of player that last detail is the whole argument.
The Modes Around the Career
Single player career is the main road. Custom Cup mode lets you set your own experience — vehicle, circuit, race type, difficulty — and race it your way. Multiplayer runs through RaceNet, Codemasters’ community hub, where players form racing clubs, earn XP and cash, fulfil sponsor objectives, then spend the earnings on buying and upgrading vehicles.
RaceNet Challenges arrived soon after launch, giving players specific sets of tasks to attack. Splitscreen multiplayer is here too, which matters more than it should in 2014. Local racing against someone in the same room has become rare enough that its presence reads as a statement.
What Got Left Out
Grid Autosport does not feature vehicle customisation in single player career. It exists in online mode only. That is a real subtraction from a series that once traded on tinkering, and the studio’s race-first framing does not fully cover it.
The trade is deliberate. Codemasters stripped weight out of the career to put it into the driving, and the result is a game that asks you to care about setup less and about the next corner more.
Feral Interactive’s Long Tail
The original release hit Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2014. Ports followed for years afterward. Feral Interactive brought Grid Autosport to macOS and Linux, then to iOS on 27 November 2017. The Nintendo Switch version, also from Feral, arrived on 19 September 2019, and the Android release landed on 26 November 2019.
That is a five-year spread from console launch to phone. Very few racing games of this vintage get carried that far, and it says something about how well the core held up that Feral kept finding new homes for it.
The Servers Went Quiet
The game’s online servers were shut down on 16 March 2026. RaceNet clubs, the online earnings loop, the multiplayer progression — all of it is gone. Anyone arriving now gets the career, Custom Cup and splitscreen, and nothing that required a connection.
This is the part worth weighing. Grid Autosport’s online layer was never the reason to play it, but it was the reason to keep playing it after the seasons ran dry. RaceNet gave the XP and cash a destination. Without servers, the career is a closed loop with an ending.
A Sequel Moved On
A sequel, Grid, released in October 2019 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Stadia. It carries the same name as the series and arrived five years after Autosport.
Our Score
Grid Autosport is the rare course correction that worked. The handling changes and the discipline structure gave the series back the texture that Grid 2 sanded off, and critics at the time read it as a return to roots. IGDB lists a critic aggregate of 7.8 out of 10 across 13 outlets, a fair reading of a game that is very good at one thing and honest about not being everything.
The missing single player customisation is a genuine loss. The dead servers are a bigger one, though they arrived long after the game had made its case. What remains is a racing game with a clear idea of itself: sign, race, specialise, repeat. The in-car view is back. The routes are there. The teams still want you.
The Numbers
- Title: Grid Autosport
- Release year: 2014
- Developer and publisher: Codemasters (Southam); Feral Interactive on ports
- Platforms: PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, Nintendo Switch
- iOS release: 27 November 2017
- Nintendo Switch release: 19 September 2019
- Android release: 26 November 2019
- Online servers shut down: 16 March 2026
- Disciplines: Touring, Endurance, Open Wheel, Tuner, Street
- Routes and locations: over 100 routes across 22 locations
- Modes: single player, multiplayer, splitscreen
- Critic aggregate: 7.8/10 from 13 outlets on IGDB
- Score: 7.8 of 10
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